SOURCE: "Mother Tongues," in The New Yorker, June 23 & 30, 1997, pp. 156-59.

[Updike is an American novelist, critic, essayist, and short story writer. In the following review, he lauds Roy's achievements in The God of Small Things despite what he considers her "overwrought" passages and self-conscious "artiness."]

The spread of English throughout the world, via commerce and colonialism and now popular culture, has spawned any number of fluent outriggers capable of contributing to English literature. Some, like most Australians and Americans, write English with no thought of an alternative; others, like certain inhabitants of the Caribbean, Ireland, Anglophone Africa, and India, write it against a background of native tongues or patois that are abandoned or suppressed in the creative effort—an effort that to a degree enlists them in a foreign if not enemy camp, that of the colonizer. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, a work of...